modern England, but less than there should be on Locke's principles, since the legislature
overshadowed the executive. What the French Constitution will be after the present war it is
impossible to foresee.
The country where Locke's principle of the division of powers has found its fullest application is
the United States, where the President and Congress are wholly independent of each other, and the
Supreme Court is independent of both. Inadvertently, the Constitution made the Supreme Court a
branch of the legislature, since nothing is a law if the Supreme Court says it is not. The fact that
its powers are nominally only interpretative in reality increases those powers, since it makes it
difficult to criticize what are supposed to be purely legal decisions. It says a very great deal for the
political sagacity of Americans that this Constitution has only once led to armed conflict.
Locke's political philosophy was, on the whole, adequate and useful until the industrial revolution.
Since then, it has been increasingly unable to tackle the important problems. The power of
property, as embodied in vast corporations, grew beyond anything imagined by Locke. The
necessary functions of the State--for example, in education--increased enormously. Nationalism
brought about an alliance, sometimes an amalgamation, of economic and political power, making
war the principal means of competition. The single separate citizen has no longer the power and
independence that he had in Locke's speculations. Our age is one of organization, and its conflicts
are between organizations, not between separate individuals. The state of nature, as Locke says,
still exists as between States. A new international Social Contract is necessary before we can
enjoy the promised benefits of government. When once an international government has been
created, much of Locke's political philosophy will again become applicable, though not the part of
it that deals with private property.
-640-CHAPTER XV Locke's InfluenceFROM the time of Locke down to the present day, there have been in Europe two main types of
philosophy, and one of these owes both its doctrines and its method to Locke, while the other was
derived first from Descartes and then from Kant. Kant himself thought that he had made a
synthesis of the philosophy derived from Descartes and that derived from Locke; but this cannot
be admitted, at least from a historical point of view, for the followers of Kant were in the
Cartesian, not the Lockean, tradition. The heirs of Locke are, first Berkeley and Hume; second,
those of the French philosophes who did not belong to the school of Rousseau; third, Bentham
and the philosophical Radicals; fourth, with important accretions from Continental philosophy,
Marx and his disciples. But Marx's system is eclectic, and any simple statement about it is almost
sure to be false; I will, therefore, leave him on one side until I come to consider him in detail.
In Locke's own day, his chief philosophical opponents were the Cartesians and Leibniz. Quite
illogically, the victory of Locke's philosophy in England and France was largely due to the
prestige of Newton. Descartes' authority as a philosopher was enhanced, in his own day, by his
work in mathematics and natural philosophy. But his doctrine of vortices was definitely inferior to
Newton's law of gravitation as an explanation of the solar system. The victory of the Newtonian
cosmogony diminished men's respect for Descartes and increased their respect for England. Both
these causes inclined men favourably towards Locke. In eighteenth-century France, where the
intellectuals were in rebellion against an antiquated, corrupt, and effete despotism, they regarded
England as the home of freedom, and were predisposed in favour of Locke's philosophy by his
political doctrines. In the last times before the Revolution. Locke's influence